Politics Barack Hussein admits he still has no plan to stop ISIS

Obama, sounding like his critics, admits no 'complete strategy' for Iraq

President Barack Obama still doesn’t have a strategy to combat the Islamic State.

Back in September, Obama created a political problem for himself by saying “we don’t have a strategy yet” to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL.

On Monday, speaking at the end of a G-7 summit in Germany that included a meeting with the new Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, he rearranged the words and added an adjective, but said the same thing about training Iraqi troops to fight ISIL: “We don’t yet have a complete strategy,” Obama said.

The nuances of military planning don’t make for good sound bites.

To critics, this kind of statement is Obama admitting exactly what they accuse him of: that he’s a president neither prepared for what he’s facing in the Middle East, nor willing to do what now needs to be done.

“What has President Obama been doing for the last 10 months?” read a statement put out by the Republican National Committee immediately after Monday’s news conference.

That approach, they say, is more evidence of a commander in chief who’s consistently slow on the uptake — Obama called ISIL the “J.V. team” of terrorists just months before they overran the Iraq-Syrian border, seizing major territory and resources and executing American hostages.

The gaffe comes at a moment when the White House is trying to push back on a stream of bad news coming out of Iraq, insisting that despite setbacks, the overall story on combating ISIL is one of progress.

OK. Fair enough. We get it @itd86: You don't like Obama and he sucks. But where's the missing piece: Another 12 tours of duty for our all volunteer force? Another $1 billion in military aid that seems to disappear into the hands of corrupt special interests and their tribal handlers? More posturing and "Mission Accomplished" bullshit from pols who fuck things up and then take jobs with think tanks when the shit hits the fan? Can we at least agree that sloganeering by both Fox News and MSNBC is equally non-productive?

I guess I should be in favor of all of this since my life has hummed along just fine in the last fifteen years, here at my white collar job in a big city. But things are otherwise for the men and women who are actually the tip of the spear for our foreign adventures. The bottom line is that we are in the midst of an unwinding of policies that go back to WWI: the partitioning of the Middle East into spheres of influence and the veneer of nation state status for populations that were not ready for any of that. The era of authoritarian states is unraveling in front of us, and no one has a sound idea how to deal with this. Obama does not, but neither did Bush and I would venture to guess you do not either.

OK. Fair enough. We get it @itd86: You don't like Obama and he sucks. But where's the missing piece: Another 12 tours of duty for our all volunteer force? Another $1 billion in military aid that seems to disappear into the hands of corrupt special interests and their tribal handlers? More posturing and "Mission Accomplished" bullshit from pols who fuck things up and then take jobs with think tanks when the shit hits the fan? Can we at least agree that sloganeering by both Fox News and MSNBC is equally non-productive?

I guess I should be in favor of all of this since my life has hummed along just fine in the last fifteen years, here at my white collar job in a big city. But things are otherwise for the men and women who are actually the tip of the spear for our foreign adventures. The bottom line is that we are in the midst of an unwinding of policies that go back to WWI: the partitioning of the Middle East into spheres of influence and the veneer of nation state status for populations that were not ready for any of that. The era of authoritarian states is unraveling in front of us, and no one has a sound idea how to deal with this. Obama does not, but neither did Bush and I would venture to guess you do not either.

Whatever they are doing now is not working...sending drones in is not doing anything. Sure, you kill a few but they are multiplying by the day and the movement is growing stronger. The second the United States pulled out of Iraq, the "vacancy" sign to ISIS was lit. Watching the media "spin" this is also pretty funny...especially when they run stories about "gains against ISIS made"...really? President Obama will hand over the ISIS mess to the next President. Would love to see what Hillary does with this...it will be worse than it is now.